The Hoover Institution: A War Collection Founded in 1919

The Hoover Institution began as the Hoover War Collection at Stanford University in California. During the First World War, historian Ephraim Douglass Adams suggested that alumnus and trustee Herbert Hoover preserve records of Belgian relief work for future historical research. The relief commission’s operational records, dealings with governments and diplomatic papers became an important starting point.

On April 22, 1919, Hoover telegraphed his wife, Lou Henry, at Stanford from Paris, pledging $50,000 to send collectors to Europe. Adams’s 1921 report describes the April telegram and subsequent organization. He and his wife departed on May 22 and arrived in Paris on June 11. At its foundation, this was a university undertaking to gather historical documents.

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When Adams reached Paris, Hoover was occupied with the American Relief Administration, the Supreme Economic Council and the peace conference, and had not set out detailed collection rules. They agreed that Hoover would provide private funds as needed, Adams would submit accounts and reports, and the material collected would pass to Stanford University. The initial $50,000 was a starting allocation; by the time the report was written, Hoover had removed this ceiling.

The 1921 report was signed jointly by Adams, head of the history department, and Ralph Lutz, an associate professor of modern European history, as directors. Lutz had served with the American military mission in Berlin. After leaving military service in August 1919, he collected material in Central and Eastern Europe, Italy, Switzerland and other locations, later joining Stanford. A partly overlapping group of historians handled European contacts and organization and research at the university.

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Hoover’s memoirs recount that General Pershing helped assign around 15 soldiers who had previously been history teaching assistants or instructors to collect material across Europe. Economic missions helped make contacts, and grain transport ships returning to the United States carried some of the documents. This retrospective account links the rapid development of the collection to personnel and transport networks already established for relief and military work.

The collection included government documents, newspapers, society publications, propaganda and private records. Adams initially concentrated on diplomatic, military, parliamentary and food administration material before seeking complete sets of government publications for 1914–1919. Neutral countries were included: war affected their administration and social life as well as the battlefields of belligerent states.

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When Adams arrived, the Paris Peace Conference was nearing its end. States and political groups seeking recognition were still distributing large quantities of material claiming territorial, national and state rights. Captain Gilchrist of the American delegation’s library supplied duplicates and advice, but the affiliations indicated in existing catalogs did not always match the publications’ actual sources.

Adams therefore visited delegations individually, asking them to confirm which publications they endorsed and requesting documents, pamphlets or purchasing lists. For some documents whose origins were not publicly acknowledged, he separately recorded how they had been obtained. This preserved provenance and endorsement information for delegation publications, helping researchers understand the competing claims presented at the conference.

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Stanford student Robert Binkley, working as an interpreter in Paris, noticed society posters in the streets and proposed collecting wartime society publications. Adams developed this into a separate project and asked Binkley to contact organizations. The Paris war museum helped provide names and addresses. In London, Binkley visited leading men’s organizations while Mrs. Adams approached women’s groups.

Collectors requested continuous runs from 1914 rather than a handful of samples, allowing researchers to compare organizations’ activities before and during the war. By 1921, the report estimated that this category contained around 11,000 items, mainly from France, Britain and the United States. Material was shelved by country and then alphabetically by society name, supported by a working card catalog for graduate students.

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In the summer of 1919, Adams arranged an exchange of duplicates with Library of Congress head Herbert Putnam. Stanford supplied duplicates of society publications and other material to the library’s transport agents in Paris and London, while the library sent substantial numbers of wartime newspapers. Early in 1921, Stanford prepared a list of 588 available duplicate items; the library declined only 26. Exchange turned repeated acquisitions into resources that supplemented both collections.

The 1921 report states that Stanford and University of California graduate students had already used the collection. A complete catalog had not yet begun, and some relief records still awaited organization. Alongside early achievements, the report reflects the pressure created when collecting outpaced cataloging. Hoover’s 1959 statement to Stanford’s trustees further emphasized research and publication based on documents, building the later mission upon this early documentary work.

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